The rise of hip-hop

It’s not easy trying to create the world’s first hip-hop fraternity. Just ask IU sophomores Keane Rowley and Justin Wolverton who, along with sophomore Quinnton Parker, are the founders of the co-ed, multi-ethnic Greek organization Eta Iota Rho – HIP, for short.
“Because we’re starting from scratch, we have to do everything to get ourselves to a national organization level, which we are working on now,” Rowley said. “We’re just doing all we can to prepare to start it up in the fall.”
The founders of HIP have fought an uphill battle since the group was established on paper in October. Assembling the elements necessary for the fraternity’s fall 2008 launch has been a challenge for its founders. They had to find funding, a location and an advisor (their initial pick fell through because he was a graduate student rather than full-time faculty or staff).
Overcoming criticisms from other students may be one of the greatest challenges the frat will face.
“People are going to doubt until they see actual results,” Rowley said.
Tim Zawada, president of the IU chapter of the national hip-hop advocacy group Hip Hop Congress, acknowledged that the idea of a hip-hop frat might be hard to sell.
Students might “question whether hip-hop as a culture needs a frat to attempt to represent it,” Zawada said.
The frat must also differentiate itself from the Hip Hop Congress. For HIP’s part, the group’s founders contend that a plurality of organizations is needed to provide different perspectives on the genre – and that the frat will distinguish itself through the volume of its activism and its vision of hip-hop.
“Some hip-hop organizations on campus may do one event maybe twice a semester,” Rowley said, “and there’s not much exposure to it.”
People think hip-hop is about getting crunked and partying, but that’s not true, Rowley said. The frat is trying to show this to people.
HIP has been making progress in formalizing its constitution, determining its initial 16-18 core members and becoming engaged in a series of public events. Most recently, the group has been involved with this week’s Hip Hop Awareness Festival, sponsored by Hip Hop Congress, and will support tomorrow night’s Hip Hop Elements Gallery show at Foster Gresham’s Hoosier Den. In addition, its founders have high aims for the future.
“It started off as a joke at first,” Rowley said. “But then we took it seriously and we thought, ‘Wait a minute, on the IUB campus there is a definite lack of the hip-hop culture.’”
In response the founders sought to assemble “a brotherhood of individuals who are for the cause,” Rowley said. The brotherhood will consist of people who want to bring hip-hop from underground to above ground, getting rid of all the negative connotations and bring the positive to light. The fraternity plans to hold events to show people why hip-hop is good.
Both Rowley and Wolverton are recent converts to hip-hop, embracing the genre only after becoming involved in the Breakdance Club (of which they are currently president and vice president, respectively). Along with Parker, they hope to head the break dancing section of what is projected to be a four-part organization: the others specializing in DJing, MCing and graffiti. Once HIP is fully formed, each section plans to promote its specialty and teach its skills to others.
“The main thing about hip-hop is you can’t teach someone to ‘be hip-hop,’” Wolverton said. “You can give them tools and ways to better express themselves.”
Through training and promotion, HIP’s goal is for hip-hop to play a larger role in Bloomington’s culture. While there are people at IU currently involved with hip-hop, the frat’s founders claim that many have been more concerned with promoting their careers than reaching out to the community.
But HIP’s mission extends beyond the local level, to a desire to change the course of hip-hop generally.
“It just appears to me that every hip-hop song is made for a ringtone first and then hip-hop second,” Wolverton said. “It’s more the commercialization (saying) that rappers should be all about hos and getting into fights and having guns, shooting people, going to jail, all the scandal behind it rather than the root of what hip-hop was supposed to be. And that was to be a lyricist, and the production value and the quality of the music behind it.”
And for HIP, this fight to win back hip-hop from commercialization’s grip is essential for its survival.
“People have always been saying, since the late ’90s, that hip-hop is dead and, in some aspects, the true values of hip-hop are on their way out if the trends continue how they are,” Wolverton said.
“Rapping just to sell records as opposed to express yourself is a sure way to get it dead.”